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Sunday, 26 August 2012

Penguin no. 1697: Coming Up for Air by George Orwell

Ersatz, they call it. I remember reading that they were making sausages out of fish, and fish, no doubt, out of something different. It gave me the feeling that I'd bitten into the modern world and discovered what it was really made of. That's the way we're going nowadays. Everything slick and streamlined, everything made out of something else. Celluloid, rubber, chromium-steel everywhere, arc-lamps blazing all night, glass roofs over your head, radios all playing the same tune, no vegetation left, everything cemented over, mock-turtles grazing under the neutral fruit-trees. But when you come down to brass tacks and get your teeth into something solid, a sausage for instance, that's what you get. Rotten fish in a rubber skin. Bombs of filth bursting inside your mouth.

Originally published in 1939, this nostalgic book looks back on life before the First World War, regretting much that had altered since, and all that had been lost through the enthusiastic embrace (or perhaps the unsought imposition) of technological and scientific progress.

Much of England's rural landscape was inevitably degraded in its transition to a more urbanised and industrialised society, and here the many losses are remembered: woods chopped down in order to build more houses, ponds drained of water and fish, and rivers polluted by factory waste. And it is not just the vanished environments which are lamented, but also the pastimes they encouraged, and the opportunities for solitude they provided. And what did the modern world provide in return? It seems a whole range of bland and inadequate products: tasteless beer, inedible food, and mock-heritage housing estates.

Coming Up for Air is told in the first person, giving the memories, thoughts and experiences of George Bowling. But it seemed easy to forget about George, and to feel instead that this was an appeal direct from the author, a call to a contemporary audience to remember how life used to be, an urging of his readers to look around and make an assessment of whether modern life could really be considered an improvement.
Even if progress had eased the harsh living conditions of the past, it had also brought change, noise, and constant activity. In its wake opportunities for solitude and stillness had gone, and more importantly, the security of living in a stable and fathomable world had gone as well. The importance of the individual had been diminished, and everyone seemed to just accept it, as though progress had induced a blandness in people too. Orwell seems keen to awaken everyone from what he clearly considered to be an unthinking conformity.

His character George conforms as well, but not unthinkingly. He lives an ordinary life in a London suburb, but he has an awareness of what has been lost, and a prescience about what is coming. At 45 years of age he knows that his best days are behind him, for he is now overweight and his teeth are all gone (a decrepitude presented as perhaps inevitable with modern living, as none of the characters in this story fare well physically). George is almost an observer on his own life, and one thing he notices is that he is always busy, but never busy doing the things he enjoys. His wife nags and his children always need new things, so that his family is presented as a burden rather than a joy. They seem only a responsibility imposed on him by the need to live a respectable life.

So modern life is rubbish, but most people are too blind to realise this, and George, who is aware of it, is powerless to do anything about it.

George dreams of escaping - of metaphorically coming up for air. Initially he escapes in his mind, by dwelling in detail on memories of a childhood spent in the small village of Lower Binfield, not far from Reading, and particularly on the days he spent fishing. Fishing becomes a metaphor for the way life used to be, the antithesis of war; bombs and bombers seem metaphors for the future. It isn't just the destruction of the looming war that concerns George, but what may follow: even less freedom and even more conformity. Eventually it occurs to George to escape in person, and he leaves his home in London for a short holiday in the village of his childhood.

I think there is an acknowledgement that this portrayal of the past is partially sentimental in George's observation that it was always summer before the war, or at least that is how he recalls it, with the grey days and the bleak moments filtered out. I felt some sympathy with the frustration directed at the products of the modern world, for every purchase these days seems a gamble and it difficult to accept the wastefulness of technological products which are designed to fail. And yet as passionate as Orwell seems about the pre-industrial rural life (or equivalently, the life portrayed by Geraint Goodwin in The Heyday in the Blood), it is difficult to feel convinced, aware that it would be impossible to trade access to refrigeration, and internal bathrooms, and the convenience of the supermarket, for the way of living they describe.

13 comments:

I read Orwell's novels when I was at school, hated them, and vowed never to read them again. But I adore his essays. Some time ago Mary, at MarysLibrary wrote about Homage to Catalonia and Orwell's time in Spain, which made me want to re-visit him, and now you've made this sound interesting, so perhaps I'll give it a try.

This reminded me of his essays, or at least the essay in which he discusses the Boys' Weeklies. There are also elements of the earlier journalistic books in which he looks at poverty (Down and Out in Paris and London, and The Road to Wigan Pier). It was interesting in the way it looked at life in the 1930s, but it couldn't convince me - you cannot ignore that in all of these novels celebrating rural lives, the women live lives of hard word and drudgery. I don't know how they faced the day.

I've not read this particular George Orwell book, but read Burmese Days recently - fascinating novel in so many ways. I also re-read a book by Emma Larkin last month - Seret Histories: finding George Owell in a Burmese teashop - which is equally fascinating and me want to read ore Orwell, although I did read a few of his books twenty odd years ago. I like th sound of Coming up for air though.

It's very interesting to read books Orwell wrote other than 1984 and Animal Farm. They are a challenge because they can be so dispiriting (in a different way that those two are - I'm not suggesting that they are cheerful!), but what he had to say is still valuable today. Haven't read his essays yet, but I'm certainly fascinated by the idea of them

Jeremy, many of the essays are available online at sites such as this one: http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300011h.html. I particularly recommend the one he wrote on Nationalism, and Politics and the English Language. He may not have convinced me of the merits of pre-war living, but I am impressed by his consistent stance against all forms of totalitarianism. And Down and Out in Paris and London is unforgettable (it may take me a few weeks, but if I find my spare copy I will drop it into the Subiaco Library).

As I read your blog and other book blogs I wonder why the traditional media (journals, reviews, magazines etc) do not use writing of such clear high quality. There is no -ism here, just your love of literature and a clear and open style with which you are able to express it. You have probably done more to encourage people to read widely and to think about what they read, than any of the media mentioned above.

Thank you for such an encouraging comment, Colin. It reminded me of something I am aware of in my own field, though I am sure it is far more widespread. It may be difficult to conceive of papers on statistics as interesting, but those written early last century are a delight to read as the writers put considerable effort into explaining their ideas simply and clearly. But something has altered in the interim, and the effort these days seems concentrated on making things seem more complex, and more difficult to understand - as though this will be more impressive. Papers will be littered with jargon so they almost have to be decoded before they can be read. It is the reason that I mentioned the essay by Orwell on Politics and the English Language in the comment above, because he appears to be describing the beginnings of a trend which has only worsened.

In NOTES FROM A SMALL ISLAND, Bill Bryson makes an interesting point about Orwell's reporting skills. The writer was from a rather privileged background, and in THE ROAD TO WIGAN PIER he tends to view the working class as a 'strange but interesting anthropological phenomenon'. It's hard to believe that he ever talked properly to a member of the working classes, let alone entered one of their houses. You always get the feeling with Orwell that he wants you to accept his version of the world as the truth, but as soon as you start to dig a little you realise that he is a rather unreliable narrator. Like you say, the version of pre-industrial life he paints is bathed in a rosy glow of nostalgia. People may enjoy roughing it when they are on holiday, but part of the pleasure is in knowing that you can return to the pampered, air-conditioned, multi-media present. The truth is that the average modern person can, if they wish, read all of the great works of literature, see the wonders of the world without leaving their seats, and even eat things that only a few of their forebears would be able to afford. Orwell is about as convincing as Barbara Cartland.

And yet so many of us are still unhappy, possibly because our "pampered, air-conditioned, multi-media present" is a poor substitute for the sense of community that we have lost.

I don't think Orwell was out of touch. His years as a tramp and plongeur exposed him to a wide range of people and 'The Road To Wigan Pier' amply demonstrates this.

Orwell's 'nostalgia' for the pre-industrial period was nothing of the sort. He was simply warning us of the price we were paying for the comforts of modernity and his message is as relevant today as it was in the 1930s.

I guess it is the women's lives which always trouble me in these stories of the better times which existed before the First World War. I have sympathy with all his very specific criticisms of the modern world (inadequate products, the obsession with fads, too much concern for appearance, ruined landscapes), but how did the women do it? I couldn't face a life in which long hours were spent every day achieving nothing more than food on the table and a fleeting freedom from dirt.

I look back nostalgically on the Perth of my childhood and feel that it was better in almost every way than it is now, with one exception, but an important exception. I don't know whether to call it freedom, or independence, or opportunity – it is a kind of premium provided by labour-saving devices and financial independence, in that you can take the hours freed up and devote them to something which can provide a sense of achievement.

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The Idea

This is a blog about my Penguin paperback collection which is restricted to the Penguins published before Allen Lane died in 1970. These books are identifiable by the pre-ISBN numbers on their spines, and are numbered approximately in publishing order. Many of these books are now forgotten, with any lingering interest focused primarily on their covers. I aim to rediscover them one at a time, by reading and commenting on one of these vintage Penguins each week - or at least that was the plan when I started the blog five years ago; these days the timing of the posts is a little more erratic.

My Penguin books are listed on the following pages. I have about 2000 of the approximately 3000 titles, and they look great in the book shelves en masse. But depressingly, the list shows how many I still have to find....